V6, V8 gfx: X11 support doesn't exist, and likely won't for a very long while. Stan (the IP30 Port Author) recently got console mode running on this card, but from what I understand, this is a rather complex piece of video hardware. Remote X works, however.

Impact gfx: X11 is working

Onboard sound works well enough from what I hear. I tested several MP3s from console via mpg123, and they worked well. A new patch coming out next week (Jul 23-24) will enable support for the optical inputs/outputs for AES (ADAT capabilities will not be supported).

Onboard Scsi works like a charm. It wasn't entirely usable about 3 weeks ago due to reliance on the old qlogicisp driver, but with some very recent fixes to qla1280, it has replaced qlogicisp. I now run a RAID5 array using 3 50G seagate drives on my Octane, and so far, everything works great (and hdparm reports ~17.4MB/s throughput).

Onboard Ethernet works fine too. The IOC3 driver was recently re-written to make IOC3 more of a Bus device with peripherals hanging off of it, which makes IOC3 less of a nightmare device from a coder's standpoint (but not by much).

kernel 2.6.17, we are stopped at the year 2006, running a 2008 stage3 rootfs, and this is the kernel support status

CPU and memory

64-bit kernel support

Yes

Memory controller support

Yes

support for >1GB added in 2.6.12-R22

Interrupt support

Yes

SMP support

Yes

XIO support

Basic mapping

WP

work in progress - XIO API

Device discovery

WP

it basically works, but waits for XIO API

Flow control

WP

soon to come in the new XIO API

PCI support

Basic mapping

Yes

Device discovery

Yes

64-bit DMA

Yes

32-bit DMA

Yes

System bridge

Yes

Additional bridges

Yes

IOC3 support

Ethernet

Yes

also for IP27

SuperIO meta-device

Yes

also for IP27

Serial ports

Yes

also for IP27

RS232/RS422 mode switch

No =(

low priority task, but no real problems

Parallel port

No =(

unavailability of non-standard cable for testing

Real Time Clock

Yes

Software power down

Yes

Voltage monitor

No =(

low priority task, not enough information

LEDs

Yes

PS/2 ports

Yes

SCSI support

Internal devices

Yes

External devices

Yes

RAD1 support

Data DMA support

Yes

Status DMA support

Yes

Analog output

Yes

Analog input

Yes

AES output

Yes

AES input

Yes

ADAT output

No =(

no test equipment

ADAT input

No =(

no test equipment

ALSA PCM support

Yes

please report bugs!

ALSA mixer support

Yes

ImpactSR support

Linux console support

Yes

MPlayer output support

Yes

X Window support

Yes

shadowfb driver

24-bit depth setup

Yes

Video mode change

No =(

not enough information

Image DMA

Yes

Hardware cursor

Yes

2D acceleration

Yes

3D acceleration

No =(

not enough information

Flow control

No =(

not enough information, lack of XIO flow control

Multiple cards

No =(

lack of test hardware

VPro support

Linux console support

Yes

X Window support

No =(

complexity of accelerated X drivers

24-bit depth setup

Yes

2D acceleration

Yes

3D acceleration

Yes

Image DMA

No =(

it's not really easy

* Things to keep in mind when building a kernel for an SGI Octane:
* - Impact (MGRAS) console and X driver work, please report any bugs.
* - VPro (Odyssey) console works, but no X driver exists yet.
* - PCI Card Cages should work for many devices, except certain types like
* PCI-to-PCI bridges (USB hubs, USB flash card readers for example).
* - Do not use OHCI-based USB cards in Octane. They're broke on this machine.
* Patches are welcome to fix the issue.
* - Equally, UHCI Cards are showing issues in this release, but should still
* function somewhat. This issue manifests itself when using pl2303 USB->Serial
* adapters.
* - Other XIO-based devices like MENET and various Impact addons remain
* untested and are not guaranteed to work. This applies to various
* digital video conversion boards as well.

boot examples

dual boot, idea

It should be possible if you set up IRIX as per normal and leave space on the drive for Linux. Install Linux as per the guide except when you get to set up the PROM. you'll want to leave that as is. Then you'd set up arcload to boot up Linux on demand.